


quartz promise

by antigones



Category: W.I.T.C.H.
Genre: Angst, Character Study-ish, F/M, Gen, Romance, girlhood to adulthood, major angst, welcome to the twenties
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-19 12:43:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22211158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antigones/pseuds/antigones
Summary: Caleb and Cornelia reach adulthood, find romantic partners, and continue their lives in separate worlds. Even as they move on, something feels missing.
Relationships: Caleb/Elyon, Cornelia Hale/Caleb, Cornelia Hale/Peter Cook, Cornelia/Caleb
Comments: 11
Kudos: 29





	quartz promise

**Author's Note:**

> I hope I never lose you, hope it never ends  
> I'll never walk Cornelia Street again
> 
> That's the kind of heartbreak time could never mend  
> I'll never walk Cornelia Street again
> 
> —"Cornelia Street"

In the end, she moves on. 

It’s what she’s supposed to do. Cornelia Hale has never waited for anybody, much less boys who were stupid—and arrogant—and careless enough to leave her. 

Those first few days, she cries and she rages and she cries. It’s in the same room she stayed in when Caleb was a flower and she nursed him back to life with her love alone. It’s the same room she’s grown up in, gone from child to girl to woman to nothing—nothing— _nothing_ at all. 

It’s the same room, but she’s not the same person. Not anymore. The way the light hits the glass is different—the bars of sunlight and shadow filtering through the window pane. The shapes of the shadows are different too, even if they envelope her all the same when she descends into her bed and cries into the pillow. 

It’s all different, and it’s all the same. And suddenly, the woman standing in the threshold isn’t a child anymore. She’s not a girl anymore, and she’s not even a Guardian anymore. At least, not in the traditional sense. Not in the sense of saving the world and feeling satisfied with what you’ve done—because nobody else could do it. 

Cornelia Hale walks into her shadow-ridden room, and she feels demons—sees shadows—hears voices and sounds she hasn’t even thought about in years with vivid clarity. She flips on the light switch, as if to allay the demons, even if she knows deep inside they’ll still persist. She thinks a chilling thought, and she doesn’t reflect on it—not here—not now—not ever. 

Her old mirror is still on her vanity. That was the one thing her mother never threw out or sold, even if it would’ve elicited a handsome price. 

Was it to mock her, Cornelia wonders? Probably.

The white paint is chipped from years of use, and her old nail polishes from her teenage days are still in their vermilion bottles, though almost certainly dried out by now. The mirror still shines silver and bright, and Cornelia looks at her reflection, shining in the mirror.

Cornelia Hale looks at her reflection, shining in the mirror, and she looks and looks and looks, maybe because she’s too old and too far gone for regret. Maybe because she really does hate herself.

The girl staring back at her is older, wiser, perhaps stronger. Maybe wilder, even if her wrath and power lurk behind a deceptively placid surface. She’s changed; she’s grown. The features are sharper, the edges more cutting, the beauty more sensuous than it had ever been when she was a child, and certainly more genuine than the whimsical heroine costume she donned when she turned into a Guardian. 

Cornelia Hale drops her knapsack on the floor, almost in defeat. It has her books in it; her laptop; her life. Or whatever is left of her life anyway.

Cornelia Hale is 24 years old, and she has no idea how she got to where she is today.

-

When the war is over, Caleb tries to redeem himself in peacetime. The war destroyed him; the war destroyed Meridian.

He only ever fought because he had no choice, because the only other option would have been following Phobos’ bidding and killing the people that belonged to him.

And they _do_ belong to him, oh yes. Every single life Caleb took belongs to him, just as every single life he saved belongs to him. He loves those people, because he knows how it’s like to drive a sword like butter through their chests and bellies. He knows how it’s like to see the people they loved cowering in the corner, looking at him like something he’s not. But how can he really say what he is and what he’s not? Actions determine the person you are—that’s the first lesson of humanity, but it’s only the second lesson he learned when he became something more than himself. When he became human. 

He can justify himself to Phobos any day and say he developed a free will.

He can’t justify himself to his conscience, the eyes looking wide and devastated and later enraged at him as he did what he was made to do.

That’s the first lesson he learned, which took him a step into humanity—to have a conscience.

Caleb’s conscience haunts him night and day.

He fears they’ll come back, the people he killed. The people he tried to kill, the people he let escape, the people who saw him do it.

And they come back. In his nightmares, in his dreams, and sometimes in real life.

He’s in the market buying a pair of tongs for Elyon to move the coals in her fireplace. 

Winters are vicious in Meridian. Winters are cold in Meridian.

And he sees him—he’s older now, not the nine-year-old boy who saw his blacksmith father killed because he forged weapons for the rebels, but a young man holding a pair of tongs that tremble in his hands.

A coward would leave, return to his queen without the tongs she asked for. A coward would leave and go to the blacksmith in the next town, walk around the market, and cross the bridge instead of exposing himself to those widened eyes, that inescapable judgment. A coward would tell an underling to do the queen’s bidding. 

Caleb is not a coward.

He looks the boy right in the eye, and gives him the money for the cheap metal contraption.

He recognizes him. Just as the boy’s eyes haven’t changed, the last vestige of murmuring Caleb has left to him besides the diagonal stripes on his cheeks are his forest-green eyes.

( _Your eyes are beautiful_ , she says, as if from a far-off dream. _They’re my favorite part about you_.

_That’s it? Nothing else?_

_Well_. . . .) 

Caleb doesn’t nod, doesn’t acknowledge beyond the flash of recognition in his eyes. To nod would be arrogant. To speak would be cruel.

He just tips the blacksmith’s boy double the price for tongs. 

He doesn’t tell him it’s from Queen Elyon. 

He can, but he doesn’t. Caleb is not a liar, and he’s never used the scepter or shield of a girl or queen or monarch to protect him from the damning consequences of his own deeds.

He leaves, no different from how he had come. He was the Murmurer who killed at Phobos’ bidding before, and that has never changed, even if he decided to become someone else. He would always be born in the Garden. He would always see those people _look_ at him—just _look_ at him—before the life went out of their eyes. He would always be just good enough, but never transcend the part of him that was a monster. He would always linger on the fringes of humanity, and never arrogant enough to ask for more.

He would always be a flower, silver and transient, growing on the gate to a garden that didn’t exist anymore. Sitting on the vanity of a girl who didn’t exist anymore. 

And if she did, it wasn’t for him. 

As if any amount of tip would bring the boy's father back.

As if defying Phobos restored the lives he destroyed.

As if Cornelia bringing him back to life made her become a part of his life.

-

He thinks of her never, and dreams about her sometimes. 

When Caleb did it, he never thought he would get over it. He never thought that five years down the line, he wouldn’t be waking up sweating, his heart beating, reaching for somebody who wasn’t there—expecting to sift his fingers through her sweeping blonde hair, wild tresses that belonged to another era. Another kingdom.

Of course, he deceived himself for as long as he could. But he still knew it was deceit. He just didn’t know he was such a fabulous liar, even to himself. 

He doesn’t even think about her eyes. On his worst days, her mouth—its smile, its expression, its sensuous pull—is as far as he goes. And that’s still too far. And even when he closes his eyes, he knows he can’t remember her eyes. Unless he wants his heart to stop beating.

They say your first love never leaves you, these humans. The peasants say it, and it strikes Caleb as oddly sentimental, indulgent at first—yes, he can expect these fancies at court, but do the peasants actually believe this—he can’t call it nonsense—but _this_ , whatever it is?

Later, Elyon says they say this on earth too. 

And she giggles with her hand over her mouth, anxiously shifting her eyes from side to side in that way she has, then suddenly changes the topic.

Caleb doesn’t ask her. He doesn’t need to hear the answer, maybe because he knows it already.

The truth is he knows, and he has always known what he is, just as he knows what would happen to him when he did it to her. When he left her. When he tore himself away from her, as if he was tearing his own skin from hardened muscle and sinew, his own flesh from the bones that held and shaped it. For she’d penetrated his very bones, his very flesh.

Cornelia likes to think it’s easy, and even now he can see her eyes brimming with tears and accusation looking at him, _looking_ at him, _looking_ at the person he actually is—because whatever he does, whoever he is, Caleb takes responsibility for his actions, he takes responsibility for who he is—and he knows she thinks he doesn’t care. She knows she thinks he’s a heartless bastard and his heart didn’t skip a beat when he broke hers, his pulse didn’t pause or skitter or jump. She thinks he broke her heart for the hell of it, for his own selfish reasons. Maybe she’s right.

But he knows—and he _knows_ , even if she doesn’t—that he never stopped loving her. His heart never stopped beating for her, and his body never stopped worshiping or responding to her beauty. 

Even when he’s inside Elyon, he longs for someone else. He never deludes himself into thinking she is someone else—his relationship with Elyon is too specific for that—but he thinks, just for a second, when the sex is cursory and they’re in their own heads—she would be the person he wished for. 

But he knows it’s impossible. 

If Elyon was his redemption, Cornelia was the revelation of his humanity. If Phobos created him, Cornelia restored him to life. 

He’ll never forget, even if she’s not in his life anymore. Even if she doesn’t exist anymore. 

Every single night before he goes to bed, he closes his eyes, and he sees who he is.

And to see himself is to see her. To see himself is to know her, and love her, and know that he loved her.

And that’s the third lesson of humanity, if not the most important. Or the most heartbreaking, the most compelling, the most impossible.

To love is to be human.

And these nights, his dreams are no longer ethereal, God-given. They no longer smack of destiny or hidden riddles of the heart, mind and world. They are all too human, all too mundane, all too banal. 

And he wishes they would stop almost as much as he fears they’ll fade away.

-

Sometimes he wonders at his own selfishness. He wonders, what the hell was he thinking, when he sent her on her own way like that. No closure. No goodbye. No comfort or tears of comfort.

God, it had been so hard not to grab her and pull her into him then. To not comfort her tears, to not kiss her, stroke those tears away.

He thinks this when he is older, when the illusions have shattered and the lies have dissipated. He still doesn’t think about the details of her face, but today he can look into her blue eyes more than he’d have been able to do half a decade ago. It’s her mouth that gets him now, and he doesn’t think of it. 

He doesn’t even touch himself, not anymore, he just thinks of her face and that’s enough to send him into a cold sweat.

He wonders if it would’ve been different if Elyon had had him, but he knows that has nothing to do with it. He is too old to delude himself with childish fantasies and longings for the person he could never be.

Caleb of Meridian, the Queen’s first command, the general of her army, and the leader of the rebellion, is 27 years old. And he’s still in love with the woman who left him almost a decade ago.

He wonders if he should regret.

He wonders why he doesn’t. 

-

Cornelia went through all the motions. She dated Peter. She went to college. She studied the subjects she liked and got good grades in all her classes. She had sex with her boyfriend for the first time, and she pulsed inside him in pain that turned into pleasure, but the orgasm ended almost as quickly as it came. 

She remembers Peter leaning into her on his bedroom in his dormitory at UCLA, his roommate conveniently locked out for the night, his mouth grazing over her breasts and then sucking her nipples. Cornelia felt her hips arc towards him and closed her eyes, trying not to think too hard about what was happening at all.

Peter always knew how to touch her so she felt whole again. But this was different.

Neither was it the first time. And she thought, she had felt it so many times before, he had done the same thing to her body until she’d known what to expect to keep quiet and just get through with it because she knew interrupting the flow of things was a greater transgression than getting her nipples sucked. 

It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy it, because she did. 

She just had to silence her mind in order to feel it.

She thought, _where can I go wrong now?_

And she tried something then, which made her want to kill herself later.

She didn’t know when it quite happened, when she no longer felt it was Peter kissing and touching her. But what she remembers is how her body responded then, how she grew wide with wetness and pleasure, how his fingers stroking inside of her sparked feeling, how all the coldness melted away into the impurity of feeling. 

She rose up to meet him then, to take him into her, and it didn’t feel like she was living and going through the motions of life because she had to. 

For once, she felt like she _was_ life, and she was living it. 

Cornelia’s eyes were closed the whole time, and she didn’t glimpse Peter behind the darkness of her lids. Even when his hands were elegant, the fingers slender, and not clammy and strong and broad, she did not see Peter. Even when she fisted his hair and it was soft and thick like wool, and not smooth and dense as silk, she did not see him. And even when his voice unmistakably told her who he was, she did not see him.

She saw someone she hadn’t seen in years, who only occasionally appeared in dreams after which she woke at the crack of dawn and stared in profound shock at her bedsheets. Sometimes, she would get up and go to the window of her dorm and watch the light, blending the sky from night to dawn, and think of how it looked like the seal of another world. 

Cornelia doesn’t remember if she told herself to stop, if she set her feet down in reality while Peter was inside of her. 

_Peter_ , she knew. 

But she felt, she believed, her body pulsed to a different name. 

Later, Peter said it was the best sex he’d ever had. _What made you get like that, Corny?_ he’d said. _How can I make you feel like that again_?

He begged her to teach him. But Cornelia only changed the subject; she could not bring herself to laugh or play along. 

When Peter was inside of her, she had not said the name. Her lips had fallen silent and he’d felt a moisture on his cheek when she took his face in her hands and kissed him like she’d never kissed him before. 

Cornelia had not said the name. She had still been too deeply shocked to actually believe or understand what was happening. 

Later, when Peter fell asleep on his bed with his arm thrown over her chest, Cornelia stared at the gray plaster ceiling of his dorm room and cried. 

-

He doesn’t remember when he found the tavern with the upstairs filled with rooms and wooden balconies. He remembers being drunk and seeing a flash of long blonde hair, and everything became pitch black from that point on.

When he woke up, his temples pounded with unshed pain and the woman who stood at the table of the small room was strange yet familiar. Her long blonde hair, shining red-gold in the light, reached her knees. She was preparing a mud tea drank by the common folk in Meridian in the winter months, usually to wade off a headache or cold. The aromatic mint stung his nose as she pushed it in front of him.

“Drink,” she said.

He looked into her face, blinking. She had lines around her eyes and looked so much older than what he’d seen in his dreams. Her face was broader, the angles less defined. But she was a handsome woman with a pleasant smile, and tall even when she sat down on the bed with him. 

Even though she was dressed, Caleb felt the pit of his stomach sink as he remembered last night, flashing in a series of images in his mind.

He felt his hands take the brick-red mug she offered him, not quite conscious of his movements. “I’m so sorry. . .” He swallowed, embarrassed. “I didn’t realize. . .”

“It’s all right,” she said with a smile that looked as if she knew everything, but would never tell. 

She got up to prepare another cup, leaving him alone to his thoughts.

His nose wrinkled at the strong drink. He’d drank it so many times when he was young, but the tastes and palate of the palace often didn’t allow for strong herbal drinks associated with the lower class. 

He drank deeply and instantly felt better. He awkwardly fumbled inside his purse for silvers, eyes downcast as he gave it to her. 

He didn’t ask about last night. But that wasn’t the last time he came. 

Elyon kept paramours, men she wanted to experience and sometimes women too. She’d confide in Caleb about her crushes and escapades. Sometimes, she’d share her women with him too, which he always enjoyed. He could not take her distances for long, and the closer she was, the better.

She was young and had the right to do it, he reasoned. And besides, Caleb was only her knight and general. She had the appetite and expansive desire of a queen. He was honored to be not just her leading advisor but her bedmate as well. Nobody else she pursued was like him.

But he had his nights as well, which passed in the hours between moonlight and darkness. He never told Elyon because he knew how possessive she was, and he never did anything that could allow him to have feelings for anyone other than his queen.

Gilderead, as her name was, became not a companion but a kindred spirit. On the nights he visited her, he’d get drunk. Not drunk enough to forget his name, but conscious enough to not remember it exactly as it was. Her body was strong and vigorous, holding and guiding him where he could not come on his own. He kissed her like he knew her, and if he called her by someone else’s name, she neverlet on she’d heard anything in the morning. 

She just made him that cup of strong mud tea. And in the summer once when he found himself at her door, she mixed a carrot and pickle juice instead. 

-

He loves Elyon. That is not a lie. 

She’s so tiny her body disappears underneath his brown, hard-muscled one, fragile limbs folding into his arms and legs. He loves protecting her and obeying her at the same time. He loves her. That is not a lie.

He enters her and she cries in a long, gilded note of ecstasy. He kisses her, grateful for what he has. _What is is. I live in reality—_

She buckled her hips and he grunted.

_—not dreams._

She kissed him along his neck, the side of his face, his temple.

“Do you love me?” she says breathlessly.

“Always, my queen.” 

“Do you _love_ me?” she says again, her voice rising in urgency.

“Always, Elyon.”

She doesn’t stop moving her body, just links her arms around his neck and digs her fingernails into the soft skin. 

“Say it.”

At this point he can’t handle himself anymore. Losing control, he flips her over and rams into her—then again—and again—deeply satisfied as she cries out in pleasure.

Only he can make her feel this way. Only he can protect her and still see her at her most vulnerable.

He leans close. “I love you—” he says in her ear.

She locks her legs around his waist.

“—more than anyone else.”

For just a moment, it is true. He has not loved anyone else like he loves her in that moment. She is the anchor of the life he lives, the life he has chosen, digging into the earth of his soul.

But his heart is still cloaked in dreams. . . 

_I live in reality_

_not dreams_

And for a moment, for just a series of moments, it works. He has to live in the moment until that moment becomes his _life_.What is life, if not a series of moments? 

Caleb never thinks too deeply, and he never thinks too much.

-

Cornelia loved Peter. She loved his smile, his laughter, his touch. She loved him so much she realized he didn’t deserve her. 

The waves crash on sand as Cornelia stares into the dipping sun. She’s been going with the flow so long. But she is the earth, not the water. She was never meant to not swim upstream, not quake when the water beckoned.

Peter looms behind her, and she eases in the shadow of his protection. “Corny,” he says. With so much love. “You okay?”

Cornelia sighs, as if she’s admiring the sunset. She has never pretended around Peter. She never needed to. He may not see into her depths, but he gets her, and knows just how to make her laugh and feel comfortable and smile. 

There is nobody else left in her life who knows how to make her laugh.

She closes her eyes. She likes Peter. She likes his solidity, the deep timber of his voice and his warm, sparkling brown eyes. 

She likes that when he touches her, she feels whole again. 

She _can_ live her life with him. He can be her _home_. And yet. . . 

Peter’s arms gently encircle her. “Come on. Let’s get going. The sharks will be coming out soon.”

“Peter. . .”

“Come on, Corny. We made reservations at that lobster restaurant you like. I know you’re gonna love it. They have all your favorites there, even that Italian dessert you told me about, it's cake with the creamy cheese all over it? What’s it called again?”

“Tiramisu,” Cornelia says, real mirth pouring into her voice now, her eyes still closed. 

“Come on, let’s go. I haven’t seen your dress yet. I promise I didn’t peek.”

Cornelia opens her eyes very delicately, very slowly. She sees the crystal green Santa Monica water, growing a translucent purple in the almost setting sun. 

_I control earth, not water,_ she thinks. _I am earth, not water_.

An almost inaudible sigh escapes her lips.

_I must stay rooted. I must hold myself. . . up._

The waves beat against her ankles, washing up seaweed and a cone shell.

_Like a tree. Not a seashell._

She spins around and flashes him her million dollar smile.

“Let’s go,” she says. “If we don’t head out now, we’ll be late for pictures.”

And then she breaks into a sprint. 

“Catch me if you can!” she squeals. “I’m faster—try beating me!” 

She hears Peter’s laughter as he comes after her. She is laughing and panting and breathlessly _happy_.

Maybe, just maybe, she can be happy. 

-

Now, as she stands alone at her vanity, she isn’t thinking of Peter or UCLA or transferring upstate or anything else. She isn’t thinking about all the men she’s dated, how she isolated herself from her own friends and how Irma called her out at dinner. How Will’s mouth dropped, Hay Lin blinked twice and started stroking her ponytail, and Taranee stopped eating and didn’t touch her food again. She doesn’t think about how she dragged the wrought-iron chair across the floor screeching and didn't return to the pizza restaurant.

She is looking at herself in the mirror and wondering how she made it this far. 

She remembers the girl who sat at this very vanity and once stared back at her, sixteen with budding curves and a skinny body, a button nose and rounded chin. Those blue eyes staring back, filled with lucid fire in less than a millionth of a second at the slightest provocation.

_You always used to be a sensitive child,_ her mother used to say when she was little.

Today, her features are more angular, her lips bigger and more curved. She has filled out in her body and her torso is long, her breasts still aching in the underwire bra she unwisely decided to wear for the trip back home. She is older. 

And her eyes are still so, so blue. But sadder than they were before.

She touches not the glass of the mirror, fearing it will break if she does. But she touches the white frame of the vanity, and her fingers float down the mirror to the desk. She remembers the last time she sat here like this.

Her mom has rearranged everything so she doesn’t recognize it anymore. Once, this vanity was a riot of nail polish and lipsticks and scarves and charm bracelets. Everything is neatly packaged away or organized on the table. She wouldn’t know where to look anymore.

But it’s still her home. It’s still her childhood bedroom.

And suddenly, she’s living again in memories she spent a lifetime forgetting.

Her hand comes to rest on that spot on the table where—she cannot bear to think it—a silvery, effervescent flower once lived.  A piece of. . . a piece of. . . a piece of. . . Her breath hitches in her throat. 

_Wherever. . . somewhere. . . faraway._

In this home of hers. 

When the tears come, it is not a flood called forth by the aching of the earth. Neither is it a stream flowing through the forest, or a rivulet through moss, dirt and pinecones. 

It is a wave, rolling onto the sand and rushing back into the ocean. It is the hidden pulses of the earth and water.

_No—I won’t shed a single tear over you!_

As she sits still in her chair, she remembers the words that haunted a dream she had several lives ago.

He touched her hand, and a tear dropped. _Her_ tear. A flower grew from the sadness. She felt it in the palm of her hand, her fingers wrapped around the stem. . . 

She never forgot.

_Every teardrop is a promise._


End file.
